Creating a beautiful app that’s useful and fun

A plethora of apps crowd the iTunes App Store, the Google Play Store and lots of other markets – but it takes a special app to catch the eyes of web surfers who are used to downloading a multitude of apps each month. Beyond standard and boring graphics, app developers and graphic design artists need to create something unique in order to urge users to download their apps these days.

One such beautifully designed new app that caught this reporter’s eye is called the Design Calculator, an app made for iPad, an app that reminds me of the practical ease of typing in a formula (such as I love doing pretty often when typing terms like “1.28 x 5” into Google’s search engine and readily getting the product) married with the impressive ability to look good at the same time. Not merely a powerful calculator, it’s also an application that allows people to select photos from their own libraries to personalize the experience, allowing their formula to transform the photos into a gorgeous retina background.

Apps like the Design Calculator teach both developers and users a lesson that Steve Jobs brought to the public, one that shows us all that simply because something is powerful and practical and perhaps technical doesn’t mean it can’t also be artistically designed. Why, this very MacBook Air I use to compose this article is a good-looking machine, what with its curved corners and silver components from Apple that plenty of other companies emulated in the wake of its creation.

Why simple and beautiful apps like “Blek” are also ruling the roost

Another really pretty app that’s making huge waves on the app store on iTunes is called Blek, one that the New York Times called “modern art” that plays extraordinarily well. With reviewers terming this popular app everything from elegant to intuitively beautiful, Blek is gaining the type of compliments that are usually reserved for things other than gaming apps. Indeed, the optimal heights of the design probably lay in the simplicity of black dots surrounded by varying shades of other circles, such as blue, red and purple ones that look striking in comparison to the well-known black lines that gamers draw with their fingers in attempts to knock out the dots in question.

The obvious success of apps like Blek – which hit the top spot in 27 different countries – serve as proof that customers are willing to spend money on apps that look as good as they are coded. It’s as if the buying public is hungry for apps and games on the market that haven’t merely been thrown together, but those where apparent time and care has been taken to not only ensure the functionality is useful, but the graphic user interface is a sight for sore eyes as well.

New and potential app designers, you may want to take notes and emulate these success stories.

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Just because it’s fun and practical doesn’t mean your app can’t also be pretty

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